How/where to start building/hosting your own website?

[eeps24]

1. what are some good web hosts that will host my web page?

2. what kind of tools can I use to build my webpage? all I know of is microsoft front page, but that program isnt to impressive, what else can I use?

3. Do I want a web host that offers more upload or download?

4. any other advice please

5.also what do they mean when they say I will get for example 300GB bandwidth... does that mean when i reach traffic hitting 300GB my site will no longer work till next month cycle? whats a good amount to have?

-------------------------/edit
this site is mostly just a sports blog , nothing really fancy (yet) ..

[EXreaction]

For a starter host you could try 1&1. They are not very reliable, but they are cheap and it's easy enough to setup.

I do not use any of those automatic HTML generators for websites, I write mine from scratch with a text editor. Definitely do not use Front Page. Dreamweaver could be used, but it still does not do a good job.

You will not even get near 300GB of bandwidth. For the far, far majority most sites you are looking at less then 10GB a month, but most probably use less than 1-2GB unless you host/share large files.

[RicheemxX]

If this is just a basic blog then you might want to go with blogger or another free blog site for now and worry about being fully hosted later. If you don't want to go that route then you'll need to find out which blogging platform you'd like to use (wordpress or some other) and find a host that supports whichever one you choose.

[exally]

1.hostmonster
2.dreamweaver, Zend DE
3.???
4.learn mysql or atleast phpmyadmin. Plan how you are going to use the site. If it requires just the basic HTML or if you are going to do ASP or PHP.... learn some basic javascript and CSS. (CSS is important, espceially with templated webpages).
5.300GB is the amount of transfers that the web host allows for access through your site. As excretion said 1-2 gig is going to be sufficient. Around 4gig is as high as you will need unless you start hosting a large amount of images or Videos